Unnamed Spectators at Train Race

These are the various "watchers - the black and the white, the old men, the children, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or childless or not" (96) - who assemble near Hawkhurst to witness the contest between a Confederate and a Union locomotive described by Drusilla Hawk. Drusilla implies that many of these spectators were part of a "grapevine" of oppressed and deprived people who knew of the raid before it happened (97). Drusilla's story is based on the actual Andrews Raid, which took place on April 12, 1862, but her version takes several liberties with the facts of the historical incident.